Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just issued a statement on the Facebook Blog confirming that his company has settled with the FTC over charges that it has violated user privacy over the years. Facebook is now “required to obtain consumers’ affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences”, effectively making opt in all future privacy control changes to the audience of previously shared data or content. Facebook must also submit to privacy audits every 2 y…

Normally I just ignore navel-gazing tech-industry articles like this, but people keep sending it to me, so I guess this guy is famous or something. Michael Arrington posted this article, “Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining” which quotes extensively from my 1994 diary.
He’s trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don’t do that, y… show all text

Facebook is targeting dates between April and June 2012 for an initial public offering of its stock. The company is exploring raising $10 billion in an IPO that could value Facebook at more than $100 billion.

New technologies are often greeted with fear and that is certainly true of a disruptive technology like cellphones. Yet rules that are decades old persist without evidence to support the idea that someone reading an e-book or playing a video game during takeoff or landing is jeopardizing safety.

Ten years is a long time. Sometimes it is so long that one forgets a lot more than one remembers — like the fact that it I have been blogging for a decade. I would have totally forgotten about the amount of time that has passed, had it not been for (what else) a blog post from Fred Wilson, one of the more engaging and rigorous bloggers on the web. It just so happens he is a venture capitalist, but he would be a great blogger without the VC tag as well.
His post made me ask myself: how long has … show all text

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral show all text

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was “competitive shopping.”
Lopez described a chaotic scene in the San Fernando Valley store among shoppers looking for video games soon after the sale began.
“I heard screaming and I heard yelling,” said Lopez, 18. “Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up.”
Lopez said customers were alrea… show all text

Since January 2011, Google has been filtering “piracy-related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services.
Google users searching for terms like “torrent”, “BitTorrent” and “RapidShare” will notice that no suggestions and search results appear before they type the full word. As a consequence, there’s sharp decrease in Google searches for these terms.
Initially only a handful of “piracy-related” terms were censored, but a recent update to the blacklist includes nearly all the top file-… show all text

This is the first in a series of posts this week about the Facebook phone.
After years of considering how to best get into the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being.
Code-named “Buffy,” after the television vampire slayer, the phone is planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook has tweaked heavily to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a … show all text

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.
In this post I intend to not only document the practices which enable this attack, but to also propose a remedy.
1. You Cannot Bring Y… show all text

Tech news site Mashable and its editor-at-large, Ben Parr, have parted ways under circumstances that apparently were less than amicable. The writer and entrepreneur, who had worked for the site since 2008, was fired, according to a brief Mashable statement.
Word of Parr’s departure began to bubble out late Sunday, when mail to his Mashable address started kicking back an automated “no longer here” response, and his bio page was edited to identify him as “the former editor-at-large.”
Parr then c… show all text

It seems everyone is getting freaked out by Facebook once again. Molly Wood at CNET says that Facebook’s automatic sharing features are ruining sharing. That got everyone to pile on over on Techmeme.
First, what does this automatic sharing feature (otherwise known as “frictionless sharing”) do? Well, every time I play a song on Spotify, for instance, it tells everyone something like “Robert Scoble is listening to Skrillex on Spotify.” On Facebook’s web interface that shows up over on the right … show all text

18 November 2011
Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi
Linda P.B. Katehi,
I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and … show all text

[Video Link, by terrydatiger].
At the University of California at Davis this afternoon, police tore down down the tents of students inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and arrested those who stood in their way. Others peacefully demanded that police release the arrested.
In the video above, you see a police officer [Update: UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike] walk down a line of those young people seated quietly on the ground in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, and spray them all wi… show all text

This won’t come as a surprise to a lot of people, but I am leaving TechCrunch.
My departure is something people have speculated about since Michael Arrington’s ouster two months ago, but it wasn’t an easy decision for me. This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction out of loyalty for my friend, nor is it about making a big “F-you, AOL!” statement. I’ve spent the bulk of my maternity leave agonizing about whether to stay or go– the first half of it trying to find a way to stay and feel good about it, and the show all text

One of technology’s big unresolved dramas is whether Google can still cut into the giant social networking lead now held by rival Facebook — or if its Google+ service is already sunk.
Data on the subject have been sparse, with much of the more recent information coming from traffic measurement firm Experian Hitwise. Hitwise has tended to release its numbers after Google+ has had a good week or two. Last week, for instance, was the site’s third-biggest since launch, drawing nearly 7 million vis… show all text

A bill that is very likely to pass will let government and corporations censor the internet, take down sites at the behest of corporations. My favorite sites and friends have to step up now to help stop it, or it passes: http://americancensorship.org

by Michael Grabell
The European Union on Monday prohibited the use of X-ray body scanners in European airports, parting ways with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has deployed hundreds of the scanners as a way to screen millions of airline passengers for explosives hidden under clothing.
The European Commission, which enforces common policies of the EU’s 27 member countries, adopted the rule “in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens’ health and safety.”
As a ProPublica/… show all text

The software I've been building for the past two years, ThinkUp, left beta today. Download ThinkUp 1.0 to install on your web server, or launch ThinkUp on Amazon EC2 in under 60 seconds. Here's a rundown of what ThinkUp is, what it does, and why it's important.

Every day, internet companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google mine your online social life to advertise to you more effectively. Those companies host and control your data, and you don't. Case in point: if you've tweeted more than 3… show all text

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.
There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the iPhone 4S. And the first reviews ca… show all text

Late last night, word began to spread around the tech community that one of Diaspora‘s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, had passed away. With much sadness, we’ve now confirmed this terrible news with the Diaspora team.
The news is incredibly jarring, to the point that much else I could say escapes me. Ilya was just 21. To see any member of our community pass is sad, but for one so young to go is absolutely crushing. The cause of death is currently unconfirmed.
Our sincerest condolences to I… show all text

I have worked with Flash and been part of the Flash community for about 12 or 13 years (over 10 of those with Macromedia and Adobe). Over that time there have been a lot of ups and down, but I think that the past couple of days have been some of the most difficult of my career. I wanted to make a post which will hopefully clarify some of the news from the past couple of days, and provide some more context around what is going on. First, and foremost, a couple of days ago Adobe announced the fo… show all text

It’s with both excitement and sadness that today I announce I am stepping back from my full time position at ReadWriteWeb to build a product and a company. I’ll be continuing to post at RWW regularly, but I’ve got some big new things up my sleeve as well.
After years of writing about startup companies, I’m now building one myself. Specifically, I’m building a company that’s developing a technology based on some of my favorite consulting projects I’ve done for clients over the years: an app and … show all text

After twelve years of blogging at Poynter, Jim Romenesko has submitted his resignation and I have accepted it. Jim has decided he’s ready for a fresh start now — seven weeks before he was scheduled to become a part-time employee… Read more

I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I’d be curious to know if it goes back further.
The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer.
At the time he wrote, Fitzpatrick had two points to make. The first was that it made no sense for every social website to try show all text

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View allWired.com photographers have the enviable job of shooting the coolest stuff and most intriguing people in the technology world. Now we’re giving away many of those photos to you, the public, for free.
Beginning today, we’re releasing all Wired.com staff-produced photos under… show all text

In life we connect with all kinds of people, places and things. There’s friends and family, of course, but there’s also the sports teams we root for, the coffee shops we’re loyal to, and the TV shows we can’t stop watching (to name a few). So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands—so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide. People + … show all text

Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed . . .

After a wave of reports that Groupon would have to drop the price on its initial public offering or even cancel it altogether because of skepticism about the company and its business model, the pendulum of optimism swung back again by Friday and the shares listed at $20 — well above the range Groupon was originally planning — and jumped as high as $30 when they first opened. So what happened? Did Groupon’s business suddenly improve? No, it’s still as questionable as ever. What happened says a l… show all text

Want to see what pure dedication looks like? This music video for the song “In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis is a stop-motion animation done with a background composed of jelly beans. It’s a crazy project that required 22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, and 288,000 jelly beans. They could have used CGI, of course, but each frame was carefully created by hand and photographed with a still camera. It’s even more mind-blowing given this fact: none of it was done with a green screen. Here’s an intere… show all text

Ever since I became Editor of TechCrunch in September, I’ve been looking for great writers to help fill out our coverage in Silicon Valley. And now I am pleased to announce that I’ve hired not one, but two: Josh Constine and Eric Eldon
Both come from Inside Facebook, where Eldon is the editor and Constine is the lead writer. Very few bloggers understand the ins and outs of Facebook as much as them. Constine even has a Masters in Cybersociology from Stanford (he’s that into it). Not only is C… show all text